I confess to being a bookie. No, I can't place your bets on the horses, but I will bet that maybe at least one reader is also a bookie: someone who loves books. I just can't understand how the modern generations learn anything from looking at a computer monitor all day. They take an online course, answer a few questions at the end, get a passing grade and credit for taking the course, and that's it. Have they memorized it all? What if an issue comes up in six months that was covered by the course? Where is their resource? There is no textbook they could look it up in, so what do they do? I have not the foggiest notion.

I've just finished writing about 10 of these courses — one side is what the student sees (a bunch of bullet points), and one side is for what the audio professional reads to the students while they daydream about those bullet points. I suppose maybe a bit of it might sink in. But every time I'd get technical, the boss would remind me that the students would be beginners, and to KISS — keep it simple, stupid. Yeah, but they needed to know all that tricky stuff.

Okay, so simple it is. But claim adjusting is a technical business. It's one thing to bullet point the phrase, “Arrange for an Independent Medical Exam,” and quite another to explain how to do that effectively. (It takes up about four or five pages in one of my textbooks.) What happens when the boss finally says, “Suzie, you better arrange for an IME on that claimant.” Sure, she passed the exam and knows all about it. No problem, right?